Thursday, April 17, 2008

Doesn't Matter, What Could I Be, Instrumental, Asteroid

So, a few weeks ago I started mixing What Could I Be and Doesn't Matter, but I never got around to posting about them. They are both a great deal of fun to work with and listen to. Doesn't Matter is a pretty straight forward rock song. We have double tracked rhythm guitars, double tracked lead and intro guitars, double tracked vocals, a synth, bass, solo guitar, strings and drums. The big challenge here is that everything is double tracked and fighting each other for space (I usually do doubled tracking the old fashioned way and hard pan everything left and right). What Could I Be offered a more interesting challenge. During the choruses, the strings and flutes and clarinets kinda drown out the vocals. I had a tough time just EQing them and adjusting the volume, teetering back and forth between overpowering and buried in the mix. Kinda frustrating, but it was worth and is probably my favorite song so far.The Instrumental (no name yet, I'm thinking about calling it "Goodbye Green World," but Nick has a name for it that I can't remember) is an interesting song. It is supposed to bridge the gap between the Rock-ier sounds of the first half of the album and the spacey sounds of the second half. It is basically just a reverb heavy wall of sounds. It doesn't last long; just long enough to get your mind into the place it needs to be for Asteroid.Asteroid is in a way the centerpiece of the album. It's not single material, but it encompasses the second half of the album's themes of longing and waiting. It's also the longest song on the album at 5 minutes and 21 seconds. The song relies on lyrical imagery as well as musical imagery, painting a picture (hopefully) in the listeners head of the vastness of space. It is an intimidating task, because there are so many tracks and every single one of them (except for the double tracked stuff) is playing a completely different melody. The bass line on this song is ridiculously beautiful, and I'm pretty sure it could be a song just by itself. After a day of messing around extensively with panning and reverbs, things have begun to fall into place, but I don't think I'm gonna have this one done for awhile. Tomorrow I'll be working on primarily Moostache stuff, but I'm gonna start doing For a Time as well.